The event occurred on July 18th at Washington State Community College in Marietta, Ohio. In addition to Christopher’s presentation, there was a panel discussion about community ownership models. Other experts offering information included Marty Newell from the Center for Rural Strategies, Kate Forscey from Public Knowledge, and former chairwoman of the FCC Mignon L. Clyburn, who also spoke at a Town Hall that evening.

For more information on connecting rural America, including the Appalachian regions, check out these resources:

More Resources:

Access Appalachia page - Our page includes federal statistics on broadband availability and federal subsidies for large Internet Service Providers. Find toolkits and detailed maps of 150 counties in Kentucky, Southeast Ohio, and northern West Virginia.

More than two million people across the Ohio Valley live in areas that lack any option for fast and reliable internet service. This week some of them had a chance to tell a member of the Federal Communications Commission what that means for their work, studies, and everyday life.

The Appalachian Connectivity Summit in Marietta, Ohio, explored possible local solutions. But the event came during a week that also saw large internet providers suing to stop one way to connect more people to broadband service. ...

Net Gains

For more than a decade, Christopher Mitchell has been working on broadband expansion issues with the Minnesota-based Institute for Local Self-Reliance. Mitchell gave the connectivity summit’s keynote address, and Frontier got a mention in his talk.

Mitchell argued that too much of the federal money intended to expand rural internet access goes to large companies who’ve been building substandard networks...

For an in-depth discussion about connectivity in rural America, Public Rado WAMU called our own Christopher Mitchell who joined host Joshua Johnson on the 1A show. The conversation covered a variety of topics from technical points to policy. If you missed it, you can listen now and get caught up.

Other guests included journalist Jennifer Levits, who often reports on tech matters, and Matt Larsen who is the founder and CEO of a fixed wireless ISP, Vistabeam. His company serves subscribers in rural areas.

Examining Rural Connectivity

What is the best way to get high-quality connectivity to rural America? In addition to discussing the challenges of bringing Internet access to America’s less populated regions, the panel touched on a recent proposal by Microsoft to use TV white spaces to bring Internet access to rural areas. Libraries and schools have experimented with white space technology in recent years. The low-frequency spectrum used to be reserved for television prior to digitization; now that it’s not being used for TV, it’s been freed up. White space spectrum, or TVWS, is less likely to be interrupted by trees or walls then traditional fixed wireless signals.

Microsoft announced this spring that it would partner with the Mid-Atlantic Broadband Communities Corporation (MBC), a Virginia broadband cooperative, on a pilot project using white spaces in Halifax and Charlotte Counties. The project will allow households with school kids to access their school's network from home by using TVWS.

During the interview, listeners emailed and tweeted questions to the show. In addition to the audio of the show, check out some of the comments at the 1A website. Worth the time!

It’s getting easier to find high-speed internet service in rural Wisconsin, yet there are still places where a robust online connection is as elusive as the Hodag, a mythical creature that legend says prowls the Northwoods.

What’s more, critics of government grants aimed at boosting the service across the country say much of the money is being spent on internet speeds that are obsolete.

When the service providers focus on short-term profit, rather than building the best possible network, it’s not good for rural America, said Christopher Mitchell with the Institute for Local Self Reliance, a Minneapolis nonprofit that helps communities with internet access issues.

“I don’t blame the providers any more than I blame tigers when they maul humans. They are what they are. The problem is that government policy lets them do it,” Mitchell said.

Rural areas in southeastern Ohio and north West Virginia are plagued by poor connectivity. In the Appalachian region, people are organizing to find ways to solve the problem themselves rather than face the risks facing communities with no access to high-quality Internet access. On July 18th, the National Rural Assembly will hold "The Appalachian Ohio-West Virginia Connectivity Summit" in Marietta, Ohio.

Connecting Experts With Community Members

The summit will bring experts together to share their knowledge with participants who are interested in learning more about ways to improve local connectivity. In addition to a keynote address by Christopher, breakout sessions will include topics such as broadband policy, technology, and organizing.

There will also be an afternoon panel discussion titled “Community Ownership Models” and FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn will be sharing remarks. The event is one stop on her #ConnectingCommunites listening tour around the U.S.

You can learn more about the summit and the speakers at the Rural Assembly website. They’ve also collected a list of resources and want you to share your broadband stories.

In May, experts gathered in Keystone, Colorado, for the annual Mountain Connect conference. If you weren’t able to make it, select video presentations and panel discussions were streamed via Periscope. Now those videos are archived and ready for you to watch online.

Be sure to check out the Lunch Keynote Panel. The conversation titled "Broadband Policy is Lost in the Woods" included discussion from Christopher Mitchell and Blair Levin from the Brookings Institute; Silicon Flatirons’ Phil Weiser moderated.

North Carolinians, do you feel like your state is 90 - 93 percent covered with Internet access that provides 25 Megabits per second (Mbps) download and 3 Mbps upload speeds? If you live in one of the state's many rural areas, probably not. The state is now providing an opportunity for North Carolinians to verify and comment on FCC mapping data with a new state broadband mapping tool.

Cleaning Up The Data

The state’s Department of Information Technology released the tool in May and encourages residents and businesses to test out the accuracy of their premise data. The map uses FCC acquired from ISPs that report coverage and speeds on Form 477. The data, based on census blocks, typically overstates coverage, creating maps that are unreliable and inaccurate. North Carolina officials aim to correct that.

“We want to get better data so we can go back to the FCC and tell them your data says your census block is served, but less than 25 per cent of the people are actually getting service,” says Jeff Sural, director of the North Carolina broadband infrastructure office.

With better data, state officials hope to increase FCC funding opportunities and determine what areas are in the most dire straits regarding lack of Internet access. The tool asks users to review the data that was submitted by ISPs for their address, conduct a speed test, and confirm whether or not they have access to the connectivity that the ISPs claim they do, and if not, provide more accurate information.

Once a threshold of users have completed the test to allow the results to be displayed on the map, the North Carolina Broadband Infrastructure Office will begin sharing the results on the map.

It's A Start

The effort will help obtain a more accurate picture of what’s really going on in the Internet access trenches if residents and businesses participate, but the state needs to go further to ease its connectivity problems. In a recent State Scoop article, Christopher once again pointed out the failings caused by state restrictions that discourage investment:

"[There are] a lot of opportunities with [municipal networks] and co-...

Professor Christopher S. Yoo and Timothy Pfenninger from the Center for Technology, Innovation and Competition (CTIC) at the University of Pennsylvania Law School recently released "Municipal Fiber in the United States: An Empirical Assessment of Financial Performance." The report attempts to analyze the financial future of several citywide Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) municipal networks in the U.S. by applying a Net Present Value (NPV) calculation approach. They applied their method to some well-known networks, including Chattanooga's EPB Fiber Optics; Greenlight in Wilson, North Carolina; and Lafayette, Louisiana's LUS Fiber. Unfortunately, their initial data was flawed and incomplete, which yielded a report fraught with credibility issues.

So Many Problems

In addition to compromising data validity, the authors of the study didn’t consider the wider context of municipal networks, which goes beyond the purpose of NPV, which is determining the promise of a financial investment.

Some of the more expansive problems with this report (from our Executive Summary):

They erred in claiming Wilson, Lafayette, and Chattanooga have balloon payments at the end of the term. They have corrected that error in a press release. Other errors, such as confusing the technologies used by at least two networks, are less important but decrease the study’s credibility.

Several of the cities dispute the accuracy of the numbers used in the calculations for their communities.

The Net Present Value calculation is inappropriate in this context for...

Crowdsourced broadband mapping helps North Carolina clean its data

A new tool released by the state's technology agency is being used to refine coverage data reported by the FCC and open the way for new funding opportunities.

North Carolina's state technology agency launched a new tool for measuring broadband speeds across the state Wednesday as part of long-term infrastructure planning that could bring new connectivity to rural areas.

...

A fact sheet published by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance shows that North Carolina has a deeply stratified rural-urban divide when it comes to broadband. Christopher Mitchell, ILSR's director of community broadband networks, blames the state's regulations for the disparity.

"The state perversely discourages investment from local governments and cooperatives," Mitchell writes in a 2016 report summary.

A 1999 statute limits the ability of electric cooperatives access to capital for telecommunications, while a 2011 law limits the power of local governments build internet networks.

In an email to StateScoop, Mitchell said North Carolina is "far too focused on AT&T and Charter. It is a real shame."

Disputes over how to fund the state's rural broadband efforts have been an ongoing debate in recent years. A plan sketched by former Gov. Pat McCrory had theoretically positioned all residents in the state with connectivity by 2021. Mitchell argues that the state is ignoring some of its best options by depending on a private market that has thus far consistently failed to serve certain areas of the state.

"[There are] a lot of opportunities with [municipal networks] and co-ops but the Legislature seems unable to comprehend that the big...

Municipal broadband networks do not have a strong financial track record, according to an analysis conducted by the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Technology, Innovation and Competition. The municipal broadband financial analysis, which looked at 20 municipal fiber projects, found that only nine were cash-flow positive and that of those, seven would need more than 60 years to break even.

...

An Opposing View

Municipal network advocate Christopher Mitchell, director of the Community Broadband Networks Initiative at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, pointed to several flaws in the Penn Law municipal broadband financial analysis.

He noted, for example that a substantial portion of the 20 networks studied were “early in the process and very small.” He also argued that the 2010-2014 study period may have biased the results, as that period included a recession and subscribership for some of the networks has increased substantially since 2014. He noted, for example, that EPB’s broadband network in Chattanooga had about 50,000 to 55,000 subscribers in 2014 but has now hit the 90,000 mark.

The Penn Law authors’ approach was “not the proper way to measure these networks,” said Mitchell in a phone call with Telecompetitor. The analysis “doesn’t take into account jobs created or the impact on the municipal budget,” he said.

He argued, for example, that a municipality that previously paid $1 million annually for connectivity might instead pay itself $500,000 for connectivity on the municipal network.

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Incumbent providers, grown lazy on a steady diet of public subsidies and monopoly rents, have done their best to cast this as a debate between efficient private competitors and inefficient government monopolies. But it is the incumbents that would rather regulate than compete. They resist municipal entry not because it is incompetent – no one resists incompetent competitors – or because it is unnecessary. Rather incumbents resist municipal entry because they recognize the ability of local government to offer a genuine competitive alternative to a high priced monopoly or duopoly services.